Friday, January 22, 2010

Turning off Blogger FTP

Just finished posting on Blogger Buzz about a fairly significant product decision: we're shutting down FTP publishing at Blogger.

For the vast majority of Blogger users (99.5% of them, to be exact), this is a non-issue. But for the .5% who continue to use FTP, this is going to be a non-trivial issue. Once it became obvious that we were doing this, we wanted to announce as soon as we knew what our path forward would be. As someone who started blogging on Blogger in 2001 using FTP, I personally recognize the significance of turning off one of Blogger's first features.

We will have a migration tool that will convert existing FTP users who want to migrate to Blogger's Custom Domain option (I host my blog on Blogger's servers, at my own domain: http://tins.rklau.com/), and expect that this will address the vast majority of cases users see. The tool's not ready yet, but we wanted to announce as soon as possible to give users the ability to start planning their migration or at least evaluate their options.

I know people will have questions, and we're hoping to address them as openly as possible - what this means for them, what their options are, etc. Hit me here, or leave a comment over on the dedicated blog we set up today.

12 comments:

Kent - it bums us out too. Please let me know if you have any questions about whether our custom domain option is right for you - we host hundreds of millions of page views per day on Blogger blogs, and experience none of the intermittent publication issues that are endemic to trying to FTP to thousands of FTP hosts.

That said, I don't mean to minimize your concern or frustration - let me know what I can do to help.

Kent, I know you pretty well and I know the Blogger team too. I was on FTP for 3 years and moved off FTP at the end of 2009. My understanding is that the process is much simpler now, even from when I did it. Moving from FTP was the reason for my switch from www.louisgray.com to blog.louisgray.com, but ever since I moved, it has been much better. Happy to chat any time on this.

Kent - you certainly can. That entails a CNAME for www.errbear.com, and then pointing the A records for the domain to our IP addresses. It's nearly instantaneous, depending on DNS propagation. More details:

OK, I have moved Errbear.Com to errbear.blogspot.com. I have done a lot of A Record and CName Record changes for other blogs, but this passage from the instructions confuses me:

"There are four separate A records you will create, and can be done from the same control panel you accessed your CNAME records. Simply point your naked domain (example.com, without the 'www') to each of the following IP addresses:

216.239.32.21216.239.34.21216.239.36.21216.239.38.21"

I don't see a way to direct a naked domain to 4 different IP Addresses (I use NetSol).

Never mind, I figured it out. I moved Errbear.Com to a custom domain. The process is very easy. Details and walk-through here:http://www.newsome.org/2010/01/how-to-move-from-ftp-published-blogger.shtml

Kent, thrilled to hear your migration was painless and can't thank you enough for such a clear walk-through. We're going to be doing some videos and Q&A for users that explain what our migration tool will do, but additional posts like this will help users completely understand what their options are. Thanks for sharing the write-up, and let me know what other questions you have.

Oppenheimer & Co analyst Timothy Horan said he suspected building out the trial broadband network would cost Google about $1,000 to $2,000 per subscriber if it bought unused fiber lines already underneath many cities.

What about blogs that are posted off of google hosted sites so that they are accessible in countries where google/blogger/blogspot are blocked? I live around the world. I won't be able to update or access my blog if it is hosted on google servers. What do I do to keep using the slick tools or do I have to find a new way to do it?